Intimate Photography
Photography
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Intimate Photography
Intimate photography became important in the 1970s after the rise of humanist photography and social documentary, the trends that dominated the previous decades in Europe and the United States, respectively.
How can it be defined in a few words? It is a type of documentary of people’s intimate spaces.
Photographers no longer need to travel from one end of the country to the other to show society, but instead choose to stay within their circle of acquaintances, friends, and family, and then record their most private aspects with the camera.
These private matters can be shocking, unoptimistic, raw, unidealized.
On the one hand, intimate photography has much of the ordinary, routine, and even somewhat boring life of the suburbs; on the other hand, it has much of the urban underworld, the underground, and the poor neighborhoods of the city.
It is an era in which the boundaries between different artistic disciplines are usually blurred. And intimate photography is, at the same time, documentary and artistic. Photographers use a very personal language, choosing technical resources that add their own aesthetic to their view and testimony.
In the past, with humanist photography, photographers generated optimism by showing people relating to each other from a touching human aspect. The world had experienced horrors, but there was still hope in humanity. Then, with the new social documentary, photographers “went out into the street” to record people in the midst of their society. In this case, with a look that was not optimistic, but rather showing people rather self-absorbed, indifferent, and in solitude despite being in the middle of a place full of people.
Finally, with intimacy, photographers stop “going out into the street.” They meet the whole universe in the living room of their houses, let’s say.
Representative Photographers: Larry Sultan, Larry Clark, Nan Goldin, Richard Billingham.
Image: Mom in Doorway, from the series Pictures from Home. Larry Sultan took photographs of his parents at their suburban home during the 1980’s. The book with the series was presented in 1992.
Recommended links:
Social Documentary Photography.
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